‘I want to change the image of JNU. It is a nationalistic university’

JNU Vice-Chancellor says it’s extremely unfortunate that debate today is not intellectual but physical, which is not good for any varsity

Jawaharlal Nehru University Vice-Chancellor Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit, who took charge in February this year, says the university is not looking to start new schools but to consolidate the strengths of the existing ones. Talking to The Hindu, she said the plans to start a medical college and hospital have been shelved and the university is making efforts to provide infrastructure to its School of Engineering and School of Management that were started without basic infrastructure. Excerpts:

It has been wonderful to come back to an institute that helped me grow. JNU gave me an all-India viewpoint when I came here from Tamil Nadu and it opened up the world to me. What has changed is that when I was a student, irrespective of what the major viewpoint was, the debate used to be very academic and constructive. It was in the form of speeches and pamphlets. There was no violence. I find it extremely unfortunate that the debate today is not intellectual and has become physical, which is not good for any university.

This entire debate questioning JNU’s nationalism that has come up over the last six years has hurt me a lot because JNU is a nationalistic university.

I do not believe in representing any viewpoint. I believe that I represent JNU and all students here are equal. We can politically disagree and agree to disagree, but at the level of a human being we can still be very good friends. This is what JNU taught me during my student days.

Another thing that has changed is that back then when I was a student, JNU was not so crowded. We were only 3,000 students at that time and now we are 9,000-10,000 students. It has grown quite a bit, which has thrown up many challenges.

I want to change the image of JNU because what is being projected is not the reality. You can’t judge a university from a 5% lunatic fringe. The majority of the students here have come from marginalised backgrounds looking to make a career, so this stereotyping hurts not only the university but the students as well. We are the topmost university not only in the country but also around the world in many fields. The perception is changing; people outside the university have understood that students of JNU don’t only protest, throw stones, fight and raise anti-national slogans. We are a place for academics and research where there can be differences of opinion. I respect dissent, difference, diversity, democracy and development. An important message I want to give to all students is that we are all JNUites and we are human and should not spread hatred due to difference of opinion.

We are not going to start any new schools or plan expansion during my tenure. During the last Vice-Chancellor’s tenure, many new schools were started and we are now having issues because we opened them without having the infrastructure and the faculty. We need to first resolve those issues and consolidate ourselves. Even in areas where we were given the approval to build by the DDA in 2010, we have not been able to start projects and will start doing so soon. The Higher Education Financing Agency loan will help us build and we are bringing in private philanthropy to update our labs. We are also planning to redo our classrooms and bring in state-of-the-art hybrid classrooms where a teacher can teach an audience outside JNU as well. It will help us expand not on campus but reach out to rural India. For the classrooms as well, we are looking at private philanthropy. We have not received any contribution from our alumni yet to fund developmental projects and the funds we get from the Central government are limited.